Odors in brain re-presented
"Here we report recordings of single-neuron activity in the piriform cortex and medial temporal lobe in awake humans performing an odour rating and identification task.
"We identified odour-modulated neurons within the piriform cortex, amygdala, entorhinal cortex and hippocampus. In each of these regions, neuronal firing accurately encodes odour identity.
"Notably, repeated odour presentations reduce response firing rates, demonstrating central repetition suppression and habituation.
"Different medial temporal lobe regions have distinct roles in odour processing, with amygdala neurons encoding subjective odour valence, and hippocampal neurons predicting behavioural odour identification performance. Whereas piriform neurons preferably encode chemical odour identity, hippocampal activity reflects subjective odour perception.
"Critically, we identify that piriform cortex neurons reliably encode odour-related images, supporting a multimodal role of the human piriform cortex.
"We also observe marked cross-modal coding of both odours and images, especially in the amygdala and piriform cortex.
"Moreover, we identify neurons that respond to semantically coherent odour and image information, demonstrating conceptual coding schemes in olfaction."
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Empathy recommended